A Year in Reading: Marisa Silver

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Sometimes a book can be recommended to you so much that it begins to feel irrationally dangerous to actually read it. For me, that book has been Elizabeth Bowen’sThe Death of the Heart. The novel was pressed on me so many times, often with a strange urgency, that the prospect of reading it took on the same risk as a visit to a fortune-teller might: I might learn something that I both did and didn’t want to know, something that would be both revelatory and burdensome. It wasn’t until this year that I pulled the book from my shelf where it had sat for decades like a dare. And I suppose what was revealed was that Bowen had set the bar nearly impossibly high in terms of just how deeply knowing a writer has to be to be able to describe the truly lived life. There is not one simple emotion in the book, nothing that allows you to think what you knew all along was accurate. Consider this: “There were times when Anna almost hated Eddie, for she was conscious of the vacuum inside him. As for him, he found her one mass of pretence, and detested the feeling she showed for power. Through all this, they did still again and again discover reaches of feeling in one another…Once, in a fit of penitence, she rang up Denis’s flat and heard Eddie in tears. The extreme pity she felt brought her, for some reason, to snapping point: she went straight downstairs and complained to Thomas that Eddie tired her more than she could bear.” There are so many acrobatic shifts in those few sentences it is breathtaking to read. And it happens again and again, on every page with even the most minor of characters. Bowen writes as if she is holding a lived moment up to the light like a jewel, turning it so that every time you think you behold it in its totality, you realize that you are wrong: there is so much more. She is funny and sharp and she writes as if she is teasing apart her characters’ lives with a sharp tool. A dangerous book indeed.

All I wanted was a literary life — a professional and artistic life defined by the act of creating literature, whether as a writer, a publisher of other writers, and even a curator of writers for live audiences — but achieving a dream simultaneously reveals a void.

It’s no surprise that I’m drawn to books about loneliness and solitude. I did write an essay for The Rumpus, after all, about being a melancholic person. This year was no exception. There are certain novels, essays, or poems that have made me realize this utmost truth: I am not alone in my loneliness. So many people are just trying to be heard and seen, and so much of great literature is centered around this strange and vast world we live in where we often need help finding ourselves. I look for books in which I can relate to the longings of others; a fictional or nonfictional universe that the writer creates where the beauty of existence is in our ability to articulate it in all of its complexities.
Catherine Lacey’sNobody is Ever Missing offered a particularly powerful reading experience. Lacey writes about a woman named Elyria who leaves her New York City life behind (including her husband) in order to go to New Zealand. She has no concrete plans, really, and the uncertainty that follows her from her home country to a foreign one becomes a way in which to explore the anxiety of the human condition. Who are we, really, if not foreigners in our own bodies -- trying to become some version of our selves that we can understand?
We’re all twins and clones and remakes of each other; we’re all pairs unpaired; we’re all speaking the same repeated syllable at each other and why is it that I have to go running off into a twinless solitude? What is inside this solitude but me, saying the same syllable to myself over and over and over, trying to make sense of it, trying to rearrange it.
I read this book in July, right after moving in with my boyfriend. Something held me back from leaving my windowless bedroom I had lived in for 2.5 years (we called it “the book cave”) -- and yes, it was mostly the vast quantity of books. For the longest time, literature has been my identity. Who am I without other peoples words? I was existing in my “twinless solitude,” telling myself again and again that I was nothing without my personal library. I was building a fortress of books; shielding myself from the outside world. It wasn’t until my boyfriend gently reminded me (for the seventh or eighth time) that I couldn’t fit all of my books into our shared apartment that I decided it was time to winnow down the collection from 3,000 to a more reasonable number: 1,000. It wasn’t easy, at first, to select which ones would go in the giveaway pile. How could I possibly part with books I hadn’t even read yet? Maybe those would hold the answer to questions I didn’t even know I had. But as I pulled a couple of books off of the overflowing shelves, it became easier. I was freeing myself up, “rearranging” myself, making room for the books I really wanted to read.
I thought, foolishly enough, that my stubbornness and my willingness to self-identify over and over again as the kind of person who would hoard as many books as possible meant that I was special and even charming in some semi-romantic way. I questioned who I was without 1,500 unread books in my home. Who would I be without being myself?
But I am still myself, uncertainties and all. I’ve accumulated more books, and given away others. I read and I write notes in the margins and I know I’ll always be the type of person to interact with text like I’m having a conversation with it. But I don’t know where those conversations will always lead me.
Elyria is a patron saint of uncertainty; a woman who rips herself out of the straight form of her life and analyzes the zigzag shapes of identity around her and inside her. Reading this book right after reassessing my life and the things I had accumulated reminded me of why I spend most of my waking life reading or thinking about words. I like sentences that attempt to “make sense of it;” prose that exposes our deceptively solitary hearts as something more universal.
Another book worth checking out: Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey -- a dark and atmospheric examination of female friendship, betrayal, and love. There are even Proustian moments in the book:
There is freedom there; there is always freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.
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My Dream Book: I feel the only proper way to start this Year in Reading is by telling you that last night I dreamt about meeting Curtis Sittenfeld. As I recall, we were both in a small group conversing politely, but not directly to one another, and at one point I threw caution to the wind, grabbed her by the elbow, and said, “I just have to tell you that I loooooved Eligible,” and then enumerated the reasons for a few minutes.
I did meet Curtis Sittenfeld about 10 years ago, and told her one of my top tier anecdotes, which she seemed to enjoy. I also professed my love of Eligible on Twitter earlier this year, which she acknowledged, so perhaps I feel we have a certain connection -- a connection my subconscious spun into a dream. Even so, I read Eligible in February, so why I was dreaming about it and its author nine months later is a mystery.
Allow me to reiterate, however, in the cold light of day, that I did love Eligible, Sittenfeld’s modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. My favorite thing about it is how she modernized the stakes. It’s easy to read the original, or watch the BBC version, and find it all quite charming. Your sister danced too flirtatiously at a local dance? How terribly cute. Your estate might be entailed away? How quaintly sad. You’re not married at 20? Quelle horreur. Sittenfeld translates these conflicts into a modern-day setting so that the Bennetts’ trials, embarrassments, and love lives are legitimately worrisome (until everything works out). See you in my dreams, Curtis!
Best One-Day Reading Experience: I put off watching the least season of Justified for over a year, because I knew how despondent I’d be once it was over, which was exactly what happened. To ease the blow, I bought a copy of Fire in the Hole, a book of short stories by Elmore Leonard, the titular story of which is the basis for the series. On a Sunday afternoon I poured myself a glass of whisky, sat down, and read the book cover to cover. It was perfect. See you in my dreams, Boyd Crowder!
Favorite Sentence of the Year: Bilgewater by Jane Gardam is a coming-of-age story about a smart, awkward teenage girl in 1970s England, although in the way of most awkward girl novels, it turns out plenty of people are in love with her. She finds herself in an amorous situation with one of them, and notes: “I was quite enchanted with myself. I had always thought I had very strong views on sexual morality. I found I had nothing of the kind.”
Book I Loved Despite Not Being Able to Tell You What Happened: Long Division by Kiese Laymon happened to me. It’s very funny, there’s time travel, a book-within-a-book, young love, and an excellent young protagonist/narrator with an excellent grandmother. I was glued to every page, and am not confident I know how it ended. Please read it and contact me. While you’re at it, read Kiese Laymon’s essay about Outkast. It was in the 2015 music issue of the Oxford American. It was also anthologized in The Fire This Time. It's ostensibly about music, but it's about -- wait for it -- so much else. You’ll recognize the grandmother.
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